PLEASE send your letters (as short as you like) to info@conservativewoman.co.uk and mark them ‘for possible publication’. We need your name and if possible, a county address, eg Yorkshire or London. We will include biographical details if you volunteer them. Letters may be shortened.
***
One rule for St Gary, another for us
Dear Editor
Like many of your readers I find myself at odds with the opinions of St Gary of Leicester City regarding illegal immigration. Because I disagree with the prevailing liberal-left groupthink I’m slurred as being a Nazi. Never mind that when last I looked there weren’t any jackboots marching down our village street here in the wilderness beyond the M25, but no matter, because I do not intend to vote in the next election. I feel increasingly disconnected and disenchanted with the prevailing imported American woke culture dominating, social and political discourse in this country.
There was I foolishly thinking that when you signed a contract of employment you abided by the rules of that contract. Those rules don’t apply to likes of smug St Gary and his cohort of rabid Britain-haters; a combination of his inflated ego and terrified BBC employers allowed him to ride roughshod over the licence fee-payers who pay his grotesque salary. The idea that the BBC maintains scrupulous impartiality is for the birds and now we have it served up on a plate of steaming hypocrisy.
There is one rule for the authoritarian, woke, leftie, liberal Establishment, including the increasingly useless political class, and quite another for ordinary voters.
A Former Voter
PS With apologies to my grandmother who was a member of the suffrage movement and to all those who gave and continue to give so tirelessly to secure the franchise in this country and overseas.
***
Wealthy EV drivers don’t need tax help
Dear Editor
More than 40 MPs and peers have written to the Chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, asking him to reduce the 20 per cent VAT levied on electricity from EV charging points down to the 5 per cent that households pay for their electricity. What a nerve! Owners have to be rich to afford an EV, they received thousands in taxpayer-funded grants and free electricity and parking at council-owned charging points. One council in Scotland supplied £260,000 of free electricity. Another has increased its prices by 130 per cent so previously council taxpayers were subsidising the electricity put into EVs. Meanwhile the UK public are suffering eye-watering gas and electricity bills to which are added 12 per cent green taxes and which, deviously, are no longer disclosed in our bills. It is these green taxes which should be reduced, not EV owners’ electricity.
Clark Cross
Linlithgow
***
The traditional family under fire
Dear Editor
In response to Francis Phillips’s review of Mary Harrington’s book, Feminism Against Progress: Trans-women aren’t trying to imitate women, they are trying to irritate women. They are succeeding only because Western governments are trying to break down what we consider the traditional family. However this sort of family, which both sets of my Victorian grandparents created – man goes out to work and earns a wage while woman stays at home to look after the children – is quite a recent idea. My grandparents came from rural areas and grew up in extended families where everyone (except babies) were expected to work together. The wages which attracted the young to leave home, select their own partner and create nuclear families are quite recent. To achieve the ‘1450’ look which Mary Harrington favours, life is going to get very short and brutish for most people and that’s possibly where we are all heading.
Kathleen Carr
Sheffield
***
Spare us the climate change routine
Dear Editor,
Scarcely a day passes without media references to climate change, which is apparently responsible for everything from the loss of homes in Hemsby due to coastal erosion to devastating floods in Africa and Asia.
Without detracting from the human anguish that accompanies such events, it is worth looking at some uncomfortable realities. For instance, even if an ocean panorama was your heart’s desire, would you choose to live in a house built on sand where the irresistible natural forces of erosion that have been at work for millennia are plain for all to see?
Similarly, the destruction caused by the flooding in Pakistan, Malawi and Mozambique from intense tropical cyclones has more to do with massive deforestation allied to escalating population pressures than to climate change. Anyone who doubts this may reflect on the fact that these countries have lost an average of 30 per cent of their valuable tree cover over the past 20 years due to a combination of agricultural and urban expansion as well as illegal logging and reliance on wood for fuel. Without trees to absorb the heavy rainfall there is unimpeded runoff, massively exacerbating flood potential. The principal driver of this environmental desecration and habitat destruction in all these countries has been the staggering population growth, which in Mozambique’s case has increased by 346 per cent since 1960 from 7.2million to 32million in 2021.
The next time we hear of extreme weather events we would do well to remember that rather than laying the blame solely at the door of human-induced climate change. there are powerful natural forces such as El Niño/La Niña and adverse human impacts on the environment that are to blame.
Neil J Bryce
Kelso
***
The joy of being a stay-at-home mum
Dear Editor
Does Jeremy Hunt realise that staying at home and bringing up your children until school age, and beyond, is a truly wonderful thing?
Sally Doxford
***
Where were pensioners in the Budget?
Dear Editor
Are you a pensioner?
Do you know you are invisible to the Conservative Government?
As far as they are concerned we don’t exist. Or rather they wish we didn’t. We are a non-productive burden to the capitalist economy and our lifetime contribution of work and National Insurance payments has no value.
Were we even mentioned in the Budget?
When it comes to elections pay them back in kind – make them equally invisible and non-existent.
Malcolm Naylor
Ilkley